Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Next Generation Touch Screen Chromebook



I was editing the post below about wanting to get a Chromebook when they were made better and then this showed up on YouTube.. Gotta love it (if it's real). 

I Want a Chromebook... Not Just any Chromebook. Google? Please listen.

I like Google stuff for lots of good reasons. Been on a run here at the Treehouse. Dual-Auth. gMail. Calendar. Chrome (aka the browser that is really fast and syncs everything), Drive, Android, Picasa. Latitude. Blogger.. And I really want a Chromebook. Was at Best Buy in Salinas a couple of weekends back... I was trading. Selling them our used iPhones for more than I paid for them new... walked away with a nice credit and the smart guy who did me right pointed out that I "needed"  a Chromebook. They had just come in "for the 2nd time" and "won't last 2 hours"... Hmmm... I like that sorta stuff... Google had a rep there too... OK. Let's put in my credentials and see what this thing will do.. It was good. Snappy. Even on BestBuy's wi-fi (Hint to retailers: follow Apple's lead and put 2 high speed wi-fi's with YOUR name on them for everyone anywhere near your store to use. Really!). But the Samsung machine sucks... and I mean really sucks... It's cheap feeling. It's really cheap looking. Has absolutely no style whatsoever.. The Acer version looks better but a spinning hard drive? In 2013? No way. I started buying SSD drives in laptops years ago (I'll send you a picture to prove it-have a dell studio xps with a sweet ssd drive in it. Paid a premium for it)... I like to run silent. But enough with the set-up. Here's what I want... a widescreen 13 or 14 inch display (12" would be ok)... retina equivalent display (whatever "retina" means now for a laptop this size). Simple. The screen should look Great and the laptop needs to be something like a MacBook Air. Or one of the many great clones from Samsung, Asus or Acer that have come out in the last year. I want to get two days without a charge. I'll settle for one. Eight hours? Needs LTE and Wi-Fi of course... Ethernet not required. 3.0 usb ports and hdmi. Expansion port. Back-lit keyboard that is the best in the business... a big touchpad. Wish-list will continue..
iPads are cool, but useless without a keyboard. Whatever you use as your traveling machine it needs to last. Last longer than a flight across the country. If you get a message that needs a response while your driving from the airport to downtown, what do you do? I know. Use your phone... but the point is, we need better design and better batteries. Apple has forced the industry to pay attention to design. Thank You. 
We have iPads.. they get used. We use our laptops a lot more though and Google Drive and Office 360 is the future of document management. Google and Android manage Photos better than Apple... Apple's web services are poor.  And Apple is not the only company that makes a beautiful computer anymore. Google programs are looking much better than they ever did. Especially on iOS.  Give us a sweet looking (touch-screen?) Chromebook at $600. With good specs and  a battery that can last and puts the iPad and MacBook Air on the bench... Google, please do this. HP and Lenovo have introduced Chromebooks... HP? Their printers don't last and every laptop I've bought from them crashed and burned. I went through 3 of them in one year including a super expensive, beautiful but slow pos that was fried by cosmic rays in an airport or on a plane. Part of the deal with this machine was that HP would come to wherever you were and replace it after they moved your files onto a new machine. They NEVER showed up... Never. We signed an exclusive contract with these guys. Bought nearly 2000 machines and had to switch vendors because their service and durability was so poor. Think Google has the right vendors in Acer and Samsung, but the current machines need a Big upgrade. Please.

PS  No sooner was I just about ready to publish this and along came the Pixel. Is it for real?